Ask HN: Career outlook in tech without a CS degree? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Career outlook in tech without a CS degree?

7 pointstodd9316 comments

Hi all. I'm a mid-20s Economics major who has been thinking about transitioning into software engineering, and am wondering what the long-term career prospects are like for someone without a CS degree. That is, even if I managed to find an entry-level job, would I ever be taken seriously for promotion?

For background, I'm currently working in finance, but have been coding as a hobby since grade school and have started to think about making a career out of it. My sense is that some tech companies are willing to hire people without CS degrees if they have the requisite skills, but I wasn't sure what their attitude was toward the same people after they got their foot in the door. I imagine a CS degree has both substantive value and signalling value, and wasn't sure how disadvantaged I'd be to lack that background.

Thanks in advance for your input.

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The hard part is getting that entry level job. My route was by way of tech support first. It gets easier from there. I’ve never had any difficulty finding a good job. I get promoted at a normal rate. After 7 years, I was getting frequent, high quality recruiter contacts for jobs that were interesting to me. After 15 years I was able to basically choose the exact job I wanted in my chosen specialty and go get it. I’m now 25 years in and so far I detect no ageism (and I have never detected credentialism), knock on wood.

I cannot specifically recall the subject of my no-college status ever coming up in an interview, or in a negative way at work.

The best and fastest way to win the entry level job is with a solid personal work portfolio.

Employers want to see what you can do, and how well you do it. Attention to detail is key on that same portfolio.

In a world where most people are presenting perfectly formatted resumes listing their education and accomplishments, the best way I've found in my 20 year career to stand out is by maintaining and updating my personal portfolio. Maintaining it allowed me to develop my own useful workflows and problem solving skills that no work role or CS education could ever allow me to learn on the fly.

I am completely self taught and have had no problem finding employment as a developer.

I have noticed a social phenomenon that I call the developer factory. University CS programs, at the bachelor level, appear designed to mass produce developers who aren’t really competent. The goal is employability not competence. They are really good at writing way too much OOP decoration to solve an otherwise trivial problem and really good at doing some whiteboard interview algorithm they will never use on the job. Unfortunately any deviation from those results excuses and failure. Everything must explicitly conform to the patterns they were taught in school.

Many large employers look for this because they know what to expect and it’s a single paradigm form of thinking that easily conforms to their other university-factory minded developers.

There are certain universities that are particularly guilty of this approach. I worked with a slew of devs from the same school and they all had the same really weird attitude and approach to software that just doesn't work. Other than that, I've met great devs who both had formal CS education / no formal education at all.

What was your route into your first job?

I am in IT and I've been around coding since 2007 but never for work. I've gotten myself out of tutorial hell and I'm building a Java/Spring app to help some biology friends, but my resume is all IT. I can't seem to even get an interview.

I think I need a portfolio but seems to take ages.

I taught myself HTML and CSS as a youngster for a personal hobby to build things. I joined Travelocity as a designer. Competent front end developers were hard to find before frameworks and JQuery did your job for you, so they involuntarily reclassified me to a developer shortly after I joined. I taught myself programming to avoid unemployment.

My recommendation is to build something marvelous to solve a personal problem.

My observations of the self taught path is that it’s harder to get a job but you will become a superior developer. That frustration continues well past you achieving employment.

CS school seems to teach programming in a very OOP Java kind of way. The results are extremely predictable and not open to much deviation. Big companies want that because it’s highly predictable.

As a self taught developer you might learn to write code with a bit of nuance that learns towards less code and higher execution performance because you aren’t wasting time with the ceremonial bullshit that CS graduates cannot live without. This is deeply frustrating because when you go to work you have to knowingly write highly inefficient bloated code far more slowly in order to achieve compatibility.

You can take the fintech route. Wall St for example, is basically tech firms that do finance. There is no other way for them to compete. Target a fintech hub. The larger the hub - new york, london etc, the more opportunities, the more open they will be. Dont sit around a small town. You have to get as close to where the action is to increase the odds. Put in a year or two and then shifting to pure tech will be straightforward. Your finance background will be an asset to get your foot in the door. Every bank, insurance, accounting firm have huge tech operations these days.

Look for ways to leverage your current experience and background. Don't just jump into entry-level web development or something completely unrelated.

That's unless you really hate what you do currently - I know some people want to move away from their current field as fast as possible.

Once you get maybe 3-4 years experience, nobody will give a crap. Work experience trumps all.

This is more because someone would rather hire anyone with 1 year xp and no education than 0 years and a CS degree. At 10 years xp, I find that my own lack of formal education is a limitation.

But hey, at that point, you make enough money and have enough free time to read a book and pick it all up again.

No one cares. I majored in Neuroscience, and I’m usually never even asked about what I studied in college in interviews. Within the job, I work with plenty of people who majored in something else, or didn’t even go to college, and they’re not taken any less seriously. The hard part is just getting your first software engineering job, since there’s way more competition for entry level software engineering.

This 100%. It's much more about what you know and who you know rather than where you went to college or what degree you had

Only HR flunkies worry about the degree. They’re trained to check-off that box.

FinTech startups would likely find your background of interest.

Look for the guy WHO you can help. Ex: CTO or Head of Engineering.

Reach out to them direct for an initial conversation.

My advise is to get a technical job in tech support in a large company's which then later give you the option to do rotation. Other option is to do a boot camp program like Hackacademy.

Go for it, with a good public portfolio that you keep working on while at the first job you'll have no trouble making your first few hops and at that mid-career point your degree is way less scrutinized

If you only started programming a few years ago, you probably aren't strong enough yet. A boot camp or preferably a CS degree would do you good.

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